


looking for trouble in all the right places

by choomchoom



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Diverges from canon during RiD 33, F/M, Fade to Black, Fake Marriage, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Getting Together, M/M, Multi, Politics, Polyamory, and turns into the political sitcom that i always wanted this series to be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:46:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22077172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/choomchoom/pseuds/choomchoom
Summary: “So we have to form an alliance with this civilization, but they won’t ally with us because they don’t recognize our leadership structure,” Windblade summarized.“There’s only one way to go about this,” Wheeljack said.Windblade nodded. “One of us is going to have to pretend to be Starscream’s conjunx.”
Relationships: Starscream/Wheeljack, Starscream/Wheeljack/Windblade, Starscream/Windblade
Comments: 22
Kudos: 114
Collections: Secret Solenoid '19-'20





	looking for trouble in all the right places

**Author's Note:**

> For the Secret Solenoid prompt "Starscream/Windblade/Wheeljack, political shenanigans" for aethergeologist!
> 
> warnings (all fairly minor) for mentions of alcohol, depictions of hypervigilence, and vague allusions to sex

Windblade stopped outside the door and took a moment to cycle her vents before entering. She had hardly raised her hand to knock when she heard Starscream say “Come in” from inside.

She schooled the annoyance off her face and did as requested. Starscream was at his desk, frowning at a datapad and surrounded by haphazard stacks of others, some of which had made their way onto the floor around him. “What do you want?” Windblade asked. It wasn’t the wording she would have used with literally any other person, but she knew that Starscream wouldn’t be fazed.

“Does the spacebridge network produce any sort of waveforms?” Starscream asked, not even looking up from what he was reading. Windblade knew that he was paying attention to her, though – that much was obvious from the way he’d not even let her knock when she’d been out in the hallway.

“I don’t think so,” Windblade said.

“What about radiation? Free radicals? Chemical byproducts?”

“Honestly, the spacebridges aren’t exactly my area of expertise. Caminus’s was inoperable since before I started training.”

Starscream huffed the most dramatic sigh Windblade had ever heard. He typed something out on his datapad. “Do you know _anything_ that would be useful?”

“Maybe.”

Starscream met Windblade’s optics just to glare at her.

Windblade glared back. “If you would tell me what the _problem_ is, I might be able to help.”

Starscream sighed again. “Wheeljack’s on his way up. I’ll explain when he gets here.”

Windblade entertained herself by watching Starscream for the few minutes it took for Wheeljack to arrive. His optics were on the datapad in front of him and he was giving the illusion of concentrating on it, but his mind was clearly elsewhere. Thinking. Windblade wondered what he might be thinking about, and unsuccessfully tried to convince herself that her wondering was out of political scrutiny.

Wheeljack entered without knocking. He looked surprised to see Windblade, but gave her a polite nod before turning to face Starscream.

Once Wheeljack had walked into the room, it was immediately obvious that all of Starscream’s attention was on him. Windblade fought the urge to step in between them to bring Starscream’s optics back to her. That response was Starscream levels of petty and she probably never even would have thought of it before meeting him.

“I’ve got a transmission from the leaders of a planet near Velocitron,” Starscream said to Wheeljack. “They reached out because they’re starting construction on a system of wormholes and want to make sure it won’t interfere with ours.”

Wheeljack blinked. “Did they send any specs?” he asked.

“No, just a bunch of questions.” He gestured Wheeljack over and handed him the datapad he’d been looking at.

Wheeljack took a moment to read through it. Windblade had no idea what it said and had not been offered a copy, so her processor had nothing to do but imagine Starscream letting her stand that close at his shoulder.

“Far as I can tell, nobody knows these things. The spacebridges are tied to the sparks of Titans. We don’t even understand how _regular_ sparks work,” Wheeljack said, passing the datapad back to Starscream.

Starscream huffed. “Do you think you’d be able to figure out from looking at their technology if it would interfere?” 

“Well, yeah, if the tech they’re using isn’t on any of the frequencies that Cybertronians use to communicate, it would be fine.”

“What are you thinking?” Windblade asked Starscream, sick of being ignored.

“Do you know about the Tyrest Accord?” Starscream asked. His full attention was suddenly on her, and it took Windblade a moment to center herself so as not to crumple under it.

She shook her head.

“Okay, you, go away. Read a book and come back when you understand the very _basics_ of how things work here.” He actually made a shooing motion with his hand.

“The Tyrest Accord is a set of laws that govern how Cybertronians interact with other species,” Wheeljack said. “We were…varyingly good about following it during the war, but it’s especially important now. The gist of the clause Starscream’s referring to is that we can’t share our technology with outsiders.” He glanced sideways at Starscream. “That wasn’t even hard. That took three sentences.”

Starscream made a disgruntled noise but didn’t argue.

“So that’s why we can’t just send over the specs of our own stuff,” Wheeljack continued. “We’ll need to look at their tech ourselves if we want to make sure that their pathways won’t interfere with ours and create a singularity that swallows both our planets.”

Windblade felt her optics widen. “That could happen?”

Wheeljack shrugged. “Sometimes it’s best to assume the worst.”

“I’ll let you know how they respond to a request for their diagrams,” Starscream said, facing Wheeljack. His optics jumped to Windblade. “Get out of my office.”

 _You invited me here_ , Windblade didn’t say, because she didn’t actually want to get shot today. Wheeljack fell in step next to her as she turned toward the door. Windblade was _well_ aware that Starscream hadn’t actually dismissed him. He looked thoughtful when she glanced over at him.

“Chances this will end in an interstellar war?” Windblade asked as the door closed behind them.

Wheeljack shrugged. “Non-zero.”

* * *

Windblade had thought about bringing drinks, but in the end, decided it would be gauche. Drinks were standard at meetings, but it wasn’t like Windblade had ever been part of a secret cabal before.

They met in Wheeljack’s hastily constructed workshop, in a corner of the hanger where Superion stood. They were all there: Windblade, Chromia, Ironhide, and Wheeljack.

“We talked today,” Wheeljack was saying. “Mostly about this Ursutra situation.”

“That’s the planet that wanted to make the wormholes?” Windblade asked, doing her best to ignore the completely stupid jealousy that always flared up when she was reminded that Wheeljack was the truest insider here. She could practically feel Chromia’s optics burning into the side of her helm and did her best to ignore it.

Wheeljack nodded. “They refused to send their specs – the data wouldn’t survive this kind of journey with the amount of encryption they’d want on it. But they invited the leaders of Cybertron for an alliance-building summit and said we could send a scientist along to look over their tech at the same time.”

Windblade frowned. That was good, right? But Wheeljack wasn’t acting like he was delivering good news. “Wait, _leaders_? Plural?”

“It turns out the residents – call themselves the Vultra – have some strange customs around only forming alliances with civilized worlds, and they have some weird criteria for civilized,” he said. “Cybertron meets most of them, despite, you know, everything, but the stipulation they’re most stringent about is that the societies they ally with have to have at least two leaders, who, I quote, “share their personal and professional lives”.”

“ _Why_?” Chromia asked, echoing Windblade’s feelings in her long-suffering tone.

“Honestly? It’s not like we can look down on anyone else’s system of government,” Ironhide said. “We were ruled by random people we interpreted as divinely selected for all of history, and then we destroyed our planet, and then we demonstrated that we’d learned nothing by electing a guy who calls himself _the_ _chosen one_.”

“Back on track,” Chromia said. “There’s no way they’re going to make an alliance with _Starscream_.”

“Well, unfortunately, we don’t have much of a choice.” Wheeljack said. “We can’t give them the specs for our tech, and the danger they contacted us about is very real. We need to get to their planet and do the summit. If we try not to, we might be on the receiving end of a wormhole collapse and the planet could be swallowed whole.”

“You people really don’t work with normal stakes, huh,” Windblade said. Destruction on that scale was dizzying to think about.

Wheeljack shrugged. “You get used to it.”

“So we have to form an alliance with this civilization, but they won’t ally with us because they don’t recognize our leadership structure,” Windblade summarized.

“There’s only one way to go about this,” Wheeljack said.

Windblade nodded. “One of us is going to have to pretend to be Starscream’s conjunx.”

Wheeljack’s optics widened. “I was going to say ‘call up Earth and ask if Jazz is willing to steal the information for us.’”

“Will that work?” Windblade asked.

“Honestly? Probably not. That nonzero chance that this whole thing ends in interstellar war? Seems like a higher chance with my plan than yours. Keep talking.”

Windblade shifted on her feet. “It wouldn’t be hard, would it? I imagine Starscream would insist on going himself, but we all know that he’s not unfamiliar with deceit. And,” she nodded to Wheeljack. “You’re the obvious choice. He trusts you.”

“If you think anyone other than me can get enough information from their technical diagrams to determine whether their stuff is actually a threat while I make nice with Starscream and that planet’s leaders, then by all means,” Wheeljack shrugged. “But in reality, nah. Everyone else I’d trust to handle the engineering side of things is on the Lost Light. It can’t be me.” He didn’t look at any of them as he said it.

And suddenly, everyone’s optics were on Windblade. Windblade’s fuel pump started to pound.

“No,” Chromia said, before anyone even voiced out loud the possibility that was obviously on all of their minds. “Windblade, you don’t have to do this. It’s a ridiculous thing to ask.”

“The continued existence of this planet is a ridiculous thing to risk,” Windblade countered. She did her best to squash the natural excitement that the concept elicited with the dozens of valid worries lighting up her processor. Everything else aside, though, she believed what she was saying – this was important. “I can do it.”

“He’d have to agree to it,” Wheeljack pointed out.

“He will,” said Ironhide. Windblade looked at him, cocking her head in curiosity. “Cybertron’s where he keeps his stuff. He’ll do what he needs to do to keep it from being sucked into a black hole.”

Windblade did her best not to be disappointed at his reasoning. Of course he wouldn’t just do it because it was _her_.

* * *

So, Windblade and Starscream were going to be conjunxes. Not _really_ , and not even legally, but they had to be convincing enough to fool the Vultra.

That meant, at Windblade’s insistence, practice. She knew that from the outside, the constant sniping that she and Starscream fell into in each other’s proximity could be read as very heavily veiled mutual fondness, but they’d never actually bothered to learn to scale it back. Windblade wasn’t even sure that she trusted _herself_ to play nice when they had to, let alone Starscream, and she needed to learn to play off of him when he was trying.

A set of totally normal, reasonable reasons.

When Windblade had proposed the “date”, Starscream had insisted on having a chaperone. There was never any question of it being anyone but Wheeljack, who was already standing outside of the gallery when Windblade arrived.

He was sipping on something in a flask and offered it to her as she walked over. After a beat, she accepted. She took a sip and choked it down. Cybertronian engex was _strong_.

Wheeljack chuckled and took another pull when she shoved the flask back at him, easy as venting. “You’re supposed to be the responsible one tonight, you know,” she said.

Wheeljack tipped the rest of the flask’s contents into his intake and then looked disappointed when it turned out to be empty after that. “I’m not babysitting sober. I’m not doing it. You can’t make me.”

“What’s babys-” Windblade was cut off by Starscream’s approach. He flew low over her and Wheeljack, the noise from his engines near enough to irritate Windblade’s audials, then landed and transformed.

“Babysitting is chaperoning for half-baked protoforms,” Wheeljack explained, as if that hadn’t just happened.

Then he turned to Starscream, who was obviously ruffled by Wheeljack’s insistence on finishing the conversation instead of greeting him immediately. He did nothing more than nod in greeting, though.

Starscream had optics only for Wheeljack for the first moment, and Windblade felt about to explode by the time he turned to her. “Darling. Sweetness. The metronome of my spark.”

Windblade had expected to have to train herself out of reacting to Starscream’s romantic overtures, but this was so obviously fake that it barely registered. “I’ll, uh, have to work on the sweetspark names, I guess,” she said. “How was your day?”

“Eventful. Such is the case when it comes to actually running the planet,” Starscream said with a dramatic and pointed sigh.

“You know that I dedicate my life to maintaining the functioning of Cybertron’s only population center,” Windblade said. “And alluding to the inconvenient fact that I’m not actually involved in the running of the government is definitely not going to fly in front of the Vultra.”

“And here I thought we were just getting to know each other,” Starscream said. He looked Windblade up and down, scrutinizing, and it wasn’t until he offered his arm to her after that she realized he’d been scanning her for hidden weapons. _Solus._ “Shall we?”

As Windblade unlocked the art gallery with the key its proprietor had given her, Wheeljack slipped away from where he was leaning against the building to walk over to the edge of the road. Ironhide pulled up a moment later, and Wheeljack reached into the cabin of Ironhide’s alt mode to drop his flask and grab a different one. Ironhide drove away and Wheeljack uncapped the fresh flask as he followed them inside.

“Okay, Starscream. If you’re so keen on us getting to know each other, ask me a question.” Was that too flirtatious? Probably. But no matter how much Starscream despised it, he was stuck with Windblade until this whole situation with the Vultra was over.

“How’s Metroplex?”

“The same, essentially. Low on nutrients, injured, still too weak for self-repair,” Windblade said. “Like I said in the last weekly report I sent you. And that’s not the kind of question that conjunxes tend to ask each other.”

“Fine, sweetspark, how was your day?” Despite the fact that they were surrounded by breathtaking artwork that wouldn’t be able to be viewed by the public until tomorrow night, Starscream’s full attention was on her. It was unnerving, the totality of his focus, as if he could see right through to her spark.

“Lovely, thank you. My friend Backscatter graciously let me take a sneak peak at her art gallery, knowing that I’ll be too busy tomorrow to appreciate her work at the opening,” Windblade said. She used Starscream’s grip on her arm to tug him toward the first exhibit that caught her eye, a print that looked like fireworks but was made of the convolved patterns of space dust particles that Backscatter had imaged herself with her electron microscope alt.

Wheeljack hovered behind them, but he was the one to break the silence. “Did she write up anything about the composition of this stuff? Doesn’t look quite like anything I’ve ever seen.”

“It’s probably got some real scientific merit – it’s from the cloud around Caminus, so I suppose it’ll have some insight into the kinetics of matter around a dying red dwarf,” Windblade said. “That’s not Backscatter’s main area of interest. Or Camiens’ in general.”

“You don’t have scientists on your unlit backwater?” Starscream asked. Wheeljack loudly reset his vocalizer. Starscream rolled his optics. “My apologies. I meant to say: how interesting, tell me more.”

Starscream’s words were as obviously ingenuine as everything else he’d said tonight, but Wheeljack seemed interested, so Windblade explained. “For most of Caminus’s remembered history, we’ve been on the brink of slow, quiet death. There used to be missions to find us a new world to settle on, and then Caminus grew too weak to ever leave, and that stopped being an option. So we haven’t focused much on science or engineering. Those things use a lot of resources and…well, no matter what we’d accomplished, there wasn’t anything that could be done that would save us in the end. We turned to the arts. Even people with alt modes like Backscatter’s.”

“Nothing you’ve said is making me regret calling Caminus a backwater,” Starscream said. “You could have left. Hell, you and Backscatter and the rest of you _have_ left. You could have tried to survive, instead of rolling over and accepting your doom.”

“Sometimes there’s more important things than survival,” Windblade said, taking her optics off the print to glance at Starscream. He didn’t visibly react.

Windblade pulled him over to the next print.

“Amazing,” Starscream said, not protesting being pulled around. “It’s as if you actually want to be here.”

“You’re just a convenient excuse,” Windblade said, effortfully not looking at him as she spoke. Behind her, she heard Wheeljack chuckle.

* * *

Chromia was waiting for her when she got back, leaning against the wall outside Windblade’s door. Windblade tried not to wince. Chromia was surely here to have a conversation that Windblade should but didn’t want to have. “Hi.” 

“How did it go?” Chromia asked, voice studiously neutral.

Windblade took a deep invent as she let herself and Chromia into her quarters. “Nobody died.”

Chromia let out a choked laugh. “That’s the standard you’re setting?”

Windblade shut the door tightly before whirling on her friend. “It was nice, okay? It was really, really nice. The summit is going to be _fun_ and I’m going to have a _good time_ and then it’s going to be _over_ and that’s going to _suck._ ”

Chromia just nodded. She was too kind to Windblade to say _I told you so_ out loud, but Windblade was pretty sure she was saying it with her optics all the same. “I don’t need to tell you again how dangerous he is.”

Windblade crossed her arms and looked at a random point on the wall. Chromia was right. Windblade already knew that.

“Is that part of the allure?”

“ _Hey_.”

Chromia held up her hands placatingly. “I know. I know. I don’t mean to tease. I just want you safe.”

Windblade knew that was true. And she knew that Chromia’s concern for her safety ended wherever it happened to interfere with Chromia’s own plans. And she was certain that Chromia thought that she was better than Starscream, who didn’t care about Windblade at all, for it.

“I’ll be careful,” Windblade said. “I promise.”

“I’ll count on it,” Chromia said. She gave Windblade one last half-smile and left, shutting the door behind her and leaving Windblade for her last night alone for the next week.

She sat down on the berth and sighed. What did being careful even mean, in a situation this complex? In the early days, Windblade had convinced herself that if she understood Starscream, she’d understand Cybertron. She’d thought she’d had Starscream nailed down, at one point, as caring only about himself.

Then she’d found out that she didn’t understand anything. She didn’t even understand Chromia. Soon after all of _that_ , Wheeljack had come back and Windblade had been forced to admit that she’d been wrong about Starscream too. Starscream obviously cared about Wheeljack. Obviously enough to show it in front of Windblade, who he’d still considered an enemy at the time.

Windblade wasn’t even sure if they were enemies now. She still went to the cabal meetings, but they’d never had clear goals and those goals were growing murkier by the day.

She tried to think of what her preferred outcome from all this even was, and all her idiot brain came up with was an image of her serving Cybertron by ruling at Starscream’s side.

* * *

Windblade stood next to Starscream, her shoulder brushing against his, closer than she normally would have stood. She could feel the heat of his frame, standing like this, and she did her best to focus despite it. The Vultra’s two leaders were hand in hand, their arms overlapping to press their shoulders closer together. Their species was bipedal, the most common anatomical configuration for organics, and comparable in size to Cybertronians. Their skin varied in shades of gray, and they wore colorful garments, made of some organic material that Backscatter would probably have been able to identify.

“Welcome,” one of the leaders said, stepping forward without releasing xer partner’s hand. “I am Filah, and this is my partner, Rellin. We are the reigning monarchs of Ursutra.”

Starscream extended his hand to Filah. “Starscream. We’ve corresponded.” Filah reached forward to greet him, pressing their palms together. “This is my most trusted engineer, Wheeljack.” Windblade barely had time to bristle at his introducing Wheeljack before introducing her when Starscream put an arm around her shoulders and said, “And this wonder of creation is my conjunx endura, Windblade.”

“Pleasure to meet you,” Windblade said, determinedly keeping a polite smile on her face and _not_ showing the little flip her spark was doing at the contact and the words _conjunx endura_.

“To you as well, you as well,” said Filah. “Come now, we’ll be showing you the governance complex where you’ll be staying.”

Starscream wrapped an arm around Windblade’s shoulders to follow Filah and Rellin toward the entrance of the building. Windblade was probably going to die from all this touching. They’d parked on the roof, and the complex expanded in front of them in elegant curves. Starscream released his arm from around Windblade’s shoulders to hold the door open for her, and almost on instinct Windblade caught his hand as it retreated back to his side. Starscream didn’t pull it away.

The monarchs took them through gardens and galleries and a digital library that made Wheeljack perk up. They were brought only briefly into the complex’s engineering core, which was where Wheeljack would apparently be doing his research. They left him there under the supervision of some Vultra engineers, already talking entirely in physics words that Windblade didn’t understand.

Starscream seemed to be getting more and more tense as time went on. He was polite to the Vultra, and kept a hand somewhere on Windblade at all times, but there was something strained beneath it all, something that, if Starscream were Windblade’s friend, would have made her want to steer him into an empty room and ask him what was wrong. Wheeljack hadn’t seemed bothered by it, so Windblade tried to keep her focus on the Vultra.

But when Rellin and Filah finally led Windblade and Starscream to their quarters and the door was safely shut behind him, Windblade couldn’t help but say something. If Starscream was worried that there was danger here, it was something that she probably ought to know about. “You seemed tense out there.”

“ _Some_ people have learned that they always have to be on their guard,” Starscream responded. He walked over to the window and glared through the glass down at the Vultra going about their business a few stories below.

“You’re not always on your guard like _that_. Much as you may hate it, I do know a few things about you by now.”

It was progress, Windblade told herself, that he didn’t try to deny it. “Did you notice that the atrium, the gallery, and the gardens all had glass ceilings?” he asked.

“Yes,” Windblade said. She thought about commenting on how lovely the effect of the refraction of the planets twin suns onto the contents of each of those rooms was, but she was actually trying to get something out of this conversation other than irritating Starscream, so she refrained.

“It’s a clever setup meant to lull you into a false sense of security,” Starscream said. “It’s a ceiling, you’re indoors, you’re covered, you’re safe. But it can break at the slightest pressure. You can shoot a bullet right through this stuff, not to mention a _real_ weapon _._ ” He tapped on the glass of the window and frowned. “You’re defenseless.”

“They’re not aiming to hurt us,” Windblade said. That much, at the bare minimum, was clear. If the Vultra had wanted to hurt Cybertron, the easiest way to do so would have been to neglect to contact them about the wormhole construction in the first place.

“You can’t ever guarantee that,” Starscream said.

There was a knock at the door, saving Windblade from having to come up with a response. “Come in,” said Starscream, and Windblade had a glare prepared for him before she saw that it was Wheeljack walking through the door. Starscream’s damn hypervigilant sensor settings had probably shown him that it was Wheeljack and not one of the Vultra outside.

“This is gonna be a project,” Wheeljack said as soon as he walked in. “There’s apparently some technology in there that the Vultra found from this planet’s ancient civilization that they don’t even understand. I’m going to need to do most of the analyses myself.”

“Do you think that’s going to be a problem?” Starscream asked.

“’Course not. Just taking longer than I’d hoped to get an idea of what I’m looking at,” Wheeljack said. He took a seat in one of the chairs that surrounded a table on one side of the room. The other side was taken up by the window and a double-sized recharge slab nestled in a corner. Apparently the Vultra had had mechanical guests before.

“We need to get ready for this reception,” Starscream said, finally turning away from the window and toward Wheeljack and Windblade.

“You mean brief? We’ve got our stories straight, I thought,” Wheeljack said.

“No I don’t mean brief, I mean clean up. You haven’t had a coat of polish since we left Cybertron at _least_ ,” Starscream said, facing only Wheeljack. Windblade did _not_ feel a sting of rejection at that, because being offended that Starscream hadn’t called her dirty would be ridiculous.

“The Vultra are organics, they won’t care about all that,” Wheeljack said.

Starscream tossed him a jar of polish that he’d had stored in a compartment somewhere. Wheeljack caught it. “I care about all that,” Starscream announced. “There might be cameras. Photos might get back to Cybertron.”

Windblade could see Wheeljack’s smile reach his optics from beneath his faceplate. “Heh. Right, Cybertron, of course,” he said, then he took the polish and disappeared into the washrack off the berthroom.

* * *

The reception was in an atrium that they’d walked through before, and Windblade winced to see it. She knew that Starscream would hate this ceiling, a domed glass thing with thin streaks of metal connecting the panes to one another. Starscream didn’t show it though, not any more than had before. He was aware and present, and despite everything, after hearing what Starscream had to say about the ceilings, she felt safer by his side than not.

The three of them stuck close together as groups of representatives of Ursutra’s various territories introduced themselves and asked the three of them questions about Cybertron. Starscream and Windblade held onto each other, and Starscream came up with an obnoxious new moniker for Windblade every other sentence or so, and Wheeljack fit himself in seamlessly. The way the Vultra looked at the three of them, and the fact that one of them knew the answer to every question the Vultra asked, made Windblade understand what a formidable unit the three of them were, and also that Starscream had probably realized the same thing long ago. Autobot, Decepticon, colonist; scientist, politician, Cityspeaker. They were, extenuating circumstances aside, probably the best team that Cybertron could have put forth for this summit.

Still, though, Wheeljack got bored after a bit. “I’m gonna go back to the engineering room, see if I can’t get through some more decoding,” he said.

Starscream didn’t look thrilled about it, but he nodded. Wheeljack made his way out of the room, and then it was just Starscream and Windblade. Starscream didn’t miss a beat, keeping a hand firmly in Windblade’s and his head on a swivel.

The shriek of an alarm made Windblade’s wings jerk upwards in surprise, one of them hitting one of Starscream’s. Starscream turned towards her with a scathing look before appearing to prioritize and focusing on the room around them.

“We need to get you somewhere secure.” The words came from one of the Vultra, wearing the monarch’s insignia on his dark blue security uniform. The security guard ushered Starscream and Windblade away from the atrium and opened a door in the hallway just past the atrium itself, gesturing for the two of them to go in. Windblade tugged Starscream after her and was surprised when he actually followed.

The door shut behind them, leaving the two of them in a tiny windowless room. Windblade immediately knew why Starscream hadn’t bothered to resist being shoved in here – he’d just been getting off the Vultra’s radar. The first thing he did was release Windblade’s hand and go for the door.

There was no obvious locking mechanism on this side – nothing like the touchpad that the guard had used to open the door on the first place. Starscream examined the top and bottom hinges, then stepped back and raised his arms. Windblade could hear the sound of integrated guns coming online.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“They locked us in. They’re up to something,” he said. “We need to get to Wheeljack.”

“I agree with all of that,” Windblade said. A bolt of triumph cut through the tension of the situation when Starscream turned around to look at her, skepticism in his optics. She didn’t know if she’d ever actually managed to catch him off-guard before. “But we should be going that way. We want to get to Wheeljack, not cause a scene.”

Starscream’s gaze followed Windblade’s finger, which was pointing at the wall opposite the door.

“There’s a maintenance corridor back there. There’s too much space between the hallway and the atrium for there not to be.”

Starscream looked at Windblade doubtfully for another moment, then he pivoted and unloaded the missiles into the opposite wall.

When the smoke cleared, there was a clear opening into a narrow hallway, leading away in both directions. Starscream didn’t say anything to Windblade as he set off in the direction of the engineering wing. Windblade interpreted his silence as victory.

At the end, there was a door out into another hallway, and Starscream looked through it, arm raised to fire again, before beckoning Windblade out after him. The alarm still blared out here, and the wing was empty of people. The door to the engineering room was closed, as it had been when they’d stepped inside on their tour earlier, but it opened easily when Starscream tried.

“Oh. Hi,” Wheeljack said. He’d turned his helm toward Starscream as he rushed in, Windblade on his heels. He looked completely fine, paging through a file on one of the monitors in the center of the room. The room was empty except for Wheeljack and a security guard who didn’t react to Windblade and Starscream’s appearance except to nod politely at them. “Sorry if the alarm scared ya. Kel, who I was working with in here, went to go shut it off.”

“What happened?” Starscream demanded.

“I tried to get into the area behind the generators. Apparently EM fields set off something in there that I didn’t know about, because I’d barely opened the door when it started blaring.”

“I could have told you anything you wanted to know about what’s back there,” a Vultra said, coming out a nearly camouflaged door that Windblade hadn’t noticed earlier.

“Sorry again, Kel, I didn’t mean to cause a fuss.” Wheeljack looked up from the file he was reading to glance at her. “We can talk about the radiation coming off of your power source in the morning, I guess.”

The door to the engineering wing burst open behind Starscream and Windblade. Starscream turned towards the movement faster than Windblade could even comprehend. “There you are,” Rellin, who seemed to be physically inseparable from Filah, said. “We’re so glad you’re alright, we’re so sorry.”

Belatedly, Windblade remembered to grab Starscream’s hand. “Uh, we’re sorry too,” she said. “We, ah, we panicked, when we were locked in that room, and we, er, broke the wall between the maintenance corridor and the panic room.”

Filah nodded. “We understand,” xe said. “What is broken can be repaired.” Behind xer, Rellin looked thoughtful.

Filah and Rellin walked them to the guest wing and bade them goodnight from there. Starscream took Wheeljack’s arm with his free hand and pulled him into the berthroom intended for Starscream and Windblade. He released both of them once they were inside with the door closed behind them.

“Well. At least we know this visit won’t be boring,” Starscream said once the door was shut behind them. He didn’t bother to look out the window this time before sprawling on a chair, hooking a leg over one side of it, the picture of relaxation.

“I’m glad one of us is comforted by that,” Windblade said, making sure to lace the words with all the sarcasm she’d learned from Starscream.

She turned to see Wheeljack slowly shaking his head. She frowned at him, not understanding.

“Oh, calm down,” Starscream said. “If that was only a blunder we’ve got nothing to worry about, and if they were deliberately trying to scare us, I can’t imagine what end it would be to. They’re not going to try again to go after us at the time we’re most likely to be ready for it.”

Windblade opened her mouth to argue that twisted logic, but Wheeljack putting a hand on her arm kept her from speaking. She looked over to see him shaking his head again.

Windblade knew that Starscream was extremely attuned to danger – she’d seen it in the atrium, with the ceiling he hated so much, and in the panic room, where Starscream had immediately leaped into action. If _Starscream_ thought it was safe…Wheeljack, it seemed, trusted the situation to actually be safe, and Windblade supposed that she could too. If the fact that their potential enemies expected them to be ready for danger was what it took to get Starscream to relax, Windblade certainly wasn’t going to help anything by arguing.

Despite Starscream’s blasé attitude, Wheeljack never went back to his own room. None of them used the recharge setup.

When the suns began to rise, there was a knock on the door. Windblade, who was closest, got up to answer.

“Good morning,” she said to the Vultra who greeted her. Xe was wearing the now-familiar blue guard uniform.

“Good morning,” xe said. “You’re scheduled to speak with the Trade Committee in an hour.”

“We’ll be there,” Windblade said.

“Excellent. Would you happen to know the whereabouts of the engineer who came with you? We haven’t been able to find him this morning.”

“Oh, er, yes,” Windblade said. “He’s inside. We were, ah, briefing for the day.” She turned around to make sure that Wheeljack had heard her. Starscream was glowering, but his face smoothed over as she opened the door wider and he caught the eyes of the Vultra on the other side.

“I’ll head down to the engineering room in a bit,” Wheeljack said to the guard. “I know the way.”

“Excellent,” the guard said again. “Let us know if you need anything.” Xe closed the door, freeing Starscream to continue to glare at Windblade.

“I really should get down there,” Wheeljack said before Starscream could make a scathing comment about Windblade’s stammered story.

“We need a contingency plan,” Starscream said, taking his optics off Windblade to instead look at Wheeljack with a softer, considering expression. “If what happened last night was really setting you up for something, we’re going to need to be able to get out if things get messy.”

“They weren’t setting me up for anything,” Wheeljack reassured, taking a step closer to Starscream, who had his arms crossed in front of him and his back to a wall. “They didn’t know how Cybertronian physiology would affect their tech. That’s all.”

“Unless it isn’t,” Starscream countered. “We don’t know these people. We don’t understand each other. I can only guess what it is they really want.”

“Well, that’s your goal for today, innit? Learn more about them. Do that whole diplomacy thing you seem to like so much.”

“What _ever_ gave you the impression that I _like_ –”

Wheeljack shrugged. “You haven’t quit yet.”

Windblade found herself without anything to contribute as she watched them. The way Wheeljack was acting toward Starscream – standing relaxed and motionless in front of him, neither distracted nor trying to touch him at all – it wasn’t how Windblade would have gone about comforting any of her friends, but she could tell that it was working. Starscream hadn’t uncrossed his arms, but the intensity of his expression had scaled back toward neutral.

Windblade had never thought that she could come close to understanding whatever it was that existed between Starscream and Wheeljack, but in witnessing that moment, she felt like she was beginning to get it. There was a depth of groundedness, of immovability, in Wheeljack, that Windblade would have never realized existed if she hadn’t seen the unstoppable force that was Starscream crashing against it. Where Starscream was unpredictable, Wheeljack was stable. Where Starscream clearly expected argument, Wheeljack was gentle and straightforward. Windblade felt something oddly defensive in herself as she watched.

She doubted that Starscream would ever let Windblade stand that close without a lie involved.

Wheeljack left a few minutes later, and Windblade and Starscream lingered a little longer and then followed the same guard back through the atrium, where Starscream’s wings predictably tightened to avoid giving off the impression of a reaction, and then to a conference room nearby, which had a skylight but mostly a closed ceiling. Starscream surveyed it keenly and didn’t perceptibly relax.

Windblade tried to pay attention to the meetings throughout the day, she really did. But when the conversation wasn’t relevant to Windblade’s actual work of maintaining Metroplex, her mind kept drifting. She couldn’t stop thinking about the conversation this morning, when Wheeljack had been standing so close to Starscream and Starscream had neither moved to touch him or moved away. She thought about the first time she’d met Wheeljack, right after he’d woken up out of the CR chamber, how Starscream had grabbed his shoulders and positioned their faces so close together that Windblade had wondered for a moment if they were about to kiss.

* * *

Wheeljack slipped away to his own room to recharge that night after an awkward dinner with Rellin and Filah and some of the other leaders. Starscream made his way immediately to one of the chairs in the room and pulled out a datapad. “You can use the berth tonight,” he said without looking at Windblade. “I have work to catch up on.”

Windblade could remember a time when she wouldn’t have dared recharge with Starscream in the room. But now, far from Cybertron, it felt more than ever like they were on the same side. Besides, she was tired enough after not recharging the previous night that she didn’t know if she could do another full day of meetings without a good recharge.

She drifted off to what had become the familiar sounds of Starscream’s frame. She tried not to think about how, at some point in the recent past, those sounds had started to feel comforting.

* * *

Wheeljack split off to go to his own room again the next night, and Windblade turned to Starscream when they were behind the closed door of their own room. “You should get some recharge tonight,” she said, hoping that somehow this simple suggestion wouldn’t aggravate the irritating complex he had around being told what to do.

“Not everyone is dumb enough to recharge in a place this obviously actively hostile,” Starscream rejoined, not even looking at the berth in the corner.

“Some of us aren’t dumb enough to try to form an alliance with an unfamiliar alien world while completely exhausted,” Windblade said.

“I’ve gone weeks without recharging before,” Starscream said instead of actually addressing Windblade’s concern. “I’ll be fine.”

Windblade bit back the urge to throw at him examples of the snappish demeanor and increasingly upsetting hypervigilance that he’d shown today. It wouldn’t help. “I trusted you to watch my back while _I_ recharged,” Windblade tried instead.

“A display of faux vulnerability to get the other party to return the favor? I invented that trick,” Starscream snapped, optics firmly on a datapad in front of him, his other sensors very clearly directed at Windblade.

“Starscream.”

“ _You’re_ welcome to recharge if you really want to,” he snapped, acid in his voice.

She didn’t. His phrasing, though, made her wonder – “What exactly is it that _you_ want?” She’d spent all this time thinking and wondering and observing, and it had never occurred to her to ask Starscream directly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he snapped.

Windblade effortfully kept herself from rolling her optics. “It’s a simple question.”

Starscream was finally looking at her, at least, his optics burning with concentration. Windblade felt like he was seeing through her.

This, though? This was where she thrived. This was, she considered, the sort of moment that she’d hoped for when she’d volunteered for this. Starscream looking at Windblade, analyzing Windblade, thinking about Windblade. And Windblade would get to hear whatever it was he said next, and she would get to be the reason that he said it.

Starscream held Windblade’s stare for an obnoxiously long time, and eventually seemed to realize that Windblade wasn’t going to back down. “We both know you’re not going to like the answer,” he said, the deflection painfully obvious.

“What? That you want power and glory and don’t care who you have to trample to get it? I know all that.”

Starscream smiled at her in that way that, even in these times of tentative allyship, felt dangerous. “That’s not what I was going to say.”

He was scrutinizing Windblade again, and Windblade refused to grovel for the answer he clearly already thought she knew. The first thing that came to mind was Wheeljack, but there was no way he’d actually acknowledge –

Well he wasn’t, was he? He was making Windblade do it instead, because Windblade had given him the opportunity. Windblade tried not to let too much triumph, too much of the elation of solving a piece of the communicating-with-Starscream puzzle, into her voice. “You think I’m not going to like the answer because you want Wheeljack and not me.”

Strangely, there was a flicker of confusion on Starscream’s face before he neutralized it and said, “Well?”

“There’s a lot that I want from you,” Windblade said. “I’ve made my peace with all of it.”

“What is it that _you_ want, Windblade?” he asked. There was ice in his tone, but Windblade had to turn away to hide a smile all the same. He was asking because he _didn’t know_ , and because, for the first time, as far as Windblade could tell, he wanted to hear what Windblade had to say.

“I want you to care about people. In a general sense, not just people you’ve decided are worthy. I know that’s never going to happen.” And if Windblade were to get more involved in the government, which she’d never actually bothered to consider until this whole Ursutra hassle, there was always the possibility that Windblade could care enough for both of them when it came to making decisions on behalf of the populace.

“And?”

“And I want you to feel stable enough not to make stupid moves that hurt people just to maintain your power.”

“And?”

“And I want you.” She tried to keep her voice even, but it came out in a rush, a mashing of syllables instead of words. It wasn’t like he didn’t already know. Maybe this would help him believe the rest of it.

Starscream stood up. Windblade oriented toward him fully, as if directed by magnetism. “But you think I don’t want you.”

“I have no idea what you want from me.”

“I don’t know if I know either,” Starscream said, taking a step closer.

Windblade stayed perfectly still where she was. “I think I can handle whatever the answer is.”

Starscream stepped closer again. They were chest to chest, now, close enough for Windblade to feel the heat and electromagnetic signature of his frame. All she had to do was incline her head, just slightly, and her lips would be –

“I want Wheeljack here,” Starscream said, his face too close to Windblade’s for Windblade to get more from it than colors and angles. She wondered if he expected her to flinch. “What do you think of that?” 

She stepped forward, pressing their frames nearly flush together. “I think you should comm him and ask.”

* * *

Soon after Wheeljack had woken up from the CR chamber, Windblade had taken him to a bar. She’d been worried about him, what with how unclear she had been about the relationship between him and Starscream, and she’d also found herself lacking a friend while grappling with the complicated question of whether she could ever forgive Chromia.

“I know what I did, to get him to trust me like this,” Wheeljack had said, when Windblade had asked him in as roundabout a way as she could what there was between him and Starscream. “I think that’s between us two, but it’s a little sad that that’s all it took.”

Windblade had nodded, wondering what it was that had happened, but hadn’t pushed.

“It’s not even that I’m not interested,” Wheeljack had said, a few more drinks later. “It’s just – it’s a lot. A lot for one person.”

The picture the three of them, refracted against each other, had fleetingly passed through Windblade’s mind that night. Starscream the unstoppable force, constantly scheming and plotting and thinking twelve steps ahead of anyone else. Wheeljack the immovable object, cheerful and polite even as he blatantly refused to ever ask permission or forgiveness or listen when anyone tried to tell him no. And Windblade, the balance, the compromise, the communicator. The one who would bend before breaking. A necessity, in a world as complicated as theirs.

The reality of it outstripped Windblade’s imagination on the scale of Titans.

* * *

The next morning, all three of them were in line with several of the Vultra diplomats who’d come to the capitol region for the summit to tour the generator facility. Even Wheeljack hadn’t yet seen anything outside of the cramped engineering rooms, and he’d opted to come along in case seeing the tech up close gave him any insight he couldn’t get from the diagrams.

The tour was led by Kel, one of the engineers Wheeljack had been working with all week. Windblade quickly lost track of what he was saying about the generator’s wattage and reach in favor of looking at it for herself. The generator took up a large circular space next to the capitol building, the basic infrastructure being, apparently, a relic from when the ancient civilization of Ursutra had built their own wormholes. Those people were now gone and their technology forgotten, and the Vultra had only recently made the kind of engineering advances that had been necessary to allow them to use the remains.

The look of it was as familiar as any mechanical thing; power, processors, and reactions that all fed into a ring at the top that could apparently punch a hole in the universe.

Something made Windblade orient almost automatically toward Starscream. He was watching Wheeljack, who was scrutinizing a door that Kel hadn’t mentioned, a look in his optics that Windblade had learned to read as a frown.

Wheeljack seemed to notice Starscream’s attention and pinged them both on local comms instead of speaking out loud. <<That leads to the same passage as that door I couldn’t go through in the engineering rooms>>, he explained.

<<I doubt there’s any alarms on it. _I_ can read EM fields well enough to say that,>> Starscream mused. The tour group was moving forward, and Starscream pushed Wheeljack along after them. <<We’ll look into it.>>

* * *

No one had _explicitly_ told Windblade that they couldn’t leave the suite she was sharing with Starscream at night, she reminded herself as they did exactly that. And no one had _explicitly_ told any of them that they couldn’t see what was through that door, so innocuous that it was all but hidden, into the generator.

The guard out in the hallway simply nodded at them when they emerged, Windblade’s hand firmly clasped with Starscream’s for the guard’s benefit. They met Wheeljack in the stairwell at the end of the hallway and made their way to the generator room without seeing anyone else.

The door, as Starscream had predicted, opened silently after Wheeljack cut through the lock with a laser. The hallway beyond was dark except for indicator lights on the various pieces of equipment that it was designed to provide access to. The noise of machinery roared in Windblade’s audials, reminding her nonsensically of being inside Caminus.

They all clicked on headlights and landing lights, illuminating a long hallway in front of them. Wheeljack led the way.

About halfway in, it became obvious to all of them what they were looking for, and why Wheeljack hadn’t been allowed to see it in the first place.

Nestled in an alcove, hooked up to so many machines it could hardly be seen beneath all the wires, was a curve of a circle, jagged at the edges, that had obviously, _obviously_ come from a space bridge. The glyphs on it glowed green with synthetic energy.

“Why do they have that?” Windblade asked. She kept her voice low, because they were still on a stealth mission, until she realized that she could barely hear herself and that they were in a room with lots of clanging machinery behind soundproofed doors. “ _That was part of someone’s anatomy_.”

Wheeljack’s hand found hers. Windblade took the cue to cycle a vent and try to calm down. Her anger would help no one, here – not the Vultra, not Starscream and Wheeljack, not whatever Titan was out there in space, broken and probably alone with a non-functioning spacebridge, not herself.

Starscream stepped closer to the chunk of space bridge, examining the connections onto it. Windblade let her hand slip away from Wheeljack’s. Regardless of how horrifying the circumstances of this thing being here were, it was Windblade’s area of expertise. To get it away from the generator sapping it of its capabilities – and not even to any _end_ , it wasn’t like it was possible to capture and redirect the energy the spacebridges produced, any Camien could have told them that – Windblade would have to find the main power supply, and disconnect it from the generator.

She followed the largest tube she saw and stepped around the back of the space bridge chunk for a closer look.

“Step away.”

Windblade froze, then realized that in her current position, she was invisible from the hallway, so whoever had said that couldn’t have been talking to her. Through a slit in a clump of wires, she saw Starscream back away from where he’d been looking at the side of the space bridge that faced the hallway.

“You can’t actually be planning to shoot me. You’d blow your own generator to pieces!” he said, arms up in what would look, to someone who didn’t know Starscream or his integrated weapons systems very well, like surrender. Windblade noted that he’d placed himself firmly in front of Wheeljack.

“There is no generator without your technology. I won’t miss with stakes like that,” the Vultra in front of Starscream said. Windblade jumped as she recognized Rellin’s voice, which hadn’t been distinguishable from his first few snarled words.

“So this is why the computing system was ‘proprietary,’” Wheeljack said, his voice more nonchalant than it had any right to be at the edge of a standoff. “Honestly, I’m not sure what you were trying to accomplish. I never would have been able to confidently tell you whether your wormholes would interfere with ours with this at the center of the generator.”

Wheeljack was stalling, Windblade realized, and she was the one person in the situation who could use the time he was making. She refocused on the task she’d assigned herself before Rellin had found them: examining the various connections to the piece of space bridge, looking for the power hookup.

“Maybe it was a useless endeavor this whole time, if the engineer they sent to ‘learn about our technology’ is this _dense_ ,” Rellin snapped. Windblade traced a conduit with her fingers as he continued to talk – yes, this one had to be it. “We almost had it. We just needed a few hints about the math, and we thought that if you saw the rest of the information, you might let them slip and we’d have it up and running. We’d have been the richest planet in the galaxy! You Cybertronians don’t understand what you have, with these things.”

Windblade clamped down on her anger at that and focused on disconnecting the conduit. The tube came off and the synthetic glow of the glyphs started to fade. Windblade began carefully and quickly disconnecting the other wires.

“You know, you could still help us,” Rellin continued. “Just a few equations, my engineers tell me. There’s enough power. There’s the _ability_ to redirect it. We’re just missing some fundamental step. Give me the equations and we can sit down, as civilized leaders, and talk about what we might be able to do for you in return.”

Windblade kept up her work, ignoring the lurch of her fuel pump at Rellin’s offer. The Starscream she’d thought she’d understood when she’d first come to Cybertron would have taken up that bait without question. A chance to be indebted to technologically advanced people who were within spitting and spying distance of Velocitron wasn’t the kind of thing _that_ Starscream would have turned down.

“Like I said when we were having this conversation from eight _million_ light-years away,” Starscream said, getting in Rellin’s face as much as he could without actually breaking out of his conciliatory pose. “Against. Our. Laws.”

Windblade relaxed as her worry abated, then jumped as she heard another voice – Filah – from the other end of the hallway. “Are your laws more important to you than your partner’s life?”

Windblade glanced through the opening she’d squeezed through to get behind the piece of space bridge, but she couldn’t see Filah, and with the angle she was at, that meant that Filah couldn’t see her. She was confused for a moment before Filah continued, “As if we didn’t know you were lying to us in return. It’s obvious the three of you are a unit,” and Windblade realized that xe must be pointing the gun at Wheeljack.

Windblade disconnected the rest of the wires as fast as she could, until the chunk of space bridge was touching nothing but the stand it rested on. Windblade kept a hand on it as the power drained and the relays inside cycled down.

“You must be willing to come to terms,” Filah said. Windblade wondered why Starscream hadn’t said anything to xer yet, then realized that to him, a threat to Wheeljack was a threat to take seriously. “We know how the rest of the galaxy sees your race, but we understand that you’re civilized people. The three of you work so well together.”

Suddenly Starscream’s optics were on Windblade’s, hidden as she was behind the bundles of wires tangled in front of the hunk of space bridge. She nodded, knowing that he’d only see it as a flicker. “You’re right,” Starscream said, turning slowly so that his back was to Rellin and he faced Wheeljack and, behind him, Filah. “We work quite well together.”

With that, he snatched Wheeljack from the walkway and activated his thrusters. He was in the air before Rellin or Filah could get a shot off. Windblade was right behind him, navigating shakily with the chunk of spacebridge in her arms and unable to transform, in this small of a space, into her more flightworthy alt mode.

Starscream used integrated guns to punch a hole in the wall a level above the walkway. He and Wheeljack tumbled out of the core and into one of the regular palace hallways, Windblade right behind them. Wheeljack took the space bridge chunk as she climbed to her feet. Starscream led them down the hall until a contingent of five Vultra guards ran toward them from the end of it.

“No way they’re gonna let us get to the landing pad,” Wheeljack said, optics on the stairway, inaccessible behind the contingent of guards, that would have taken them to the roof.

“Go down, come on,” Starscream said, grabbing the chunk of space bridge himself to push Wheeljack toward the downward staircase on the other side of the hallway.

“The further we get from the shuttle, the more of them we’re gonna have to fight,” Wheeljack said warily, even as he did what Starscream said.

“Don’t worry, I have a plan.”

This time, for now, Windblade found herself trusting him.

* * *

The atrium ceiling had been beautiful whole, and it was also beautiful as it shattered. Windblade carried the space bridge chunk and Wheeljack held onto Starscream as they punched through the glass, heading directly for the shuttle pad on the roof.

“I’d give that a seven out of ten,” Wheeljack said from in front of the controls as they lifted off. Something beeped on the dashboard and he winced. “Hm. They’re shooting at us. Make that a six.”

Windblade gritted her teeth against the G-forces as Wheeljack evaded the potshots from Ursutra’s aerial defenses, but soon enough the shuttle’s path straightened as they accelerated toward Velocitron.

As Windblade checked to make sure the space bridge piece was still secure where she’d tied it, Starscream continued the conversation as though nothing had happened. “Only a six? I know we completely burned any chance of future diplomatic relations between Cybertron and this planet, but it _was_ entirely their fault for lying to us and it’s not like we’d heard of them before anyway.” Starscream had his feet on the dashboard now, leaning back as though he didn’t have a care in the world.

“Well, how would you rank it, then?”

Starscream appeared to actually consider this. “Nine.”

Wheeljack looked over at Starscream at that, optics wide. “I must have missed some real doozies, if that’s against the existing standard.” Windblade followed his gaze, also eager for an explanation.

Starscream chuckled. “You did,” he said. Then he looked at Wheeljack, and then he looked at Windblade, considering and uninhibited. “They all get deductions because I had to do them without you two.”

Windblade’s spark blazed. She knew that she’d done good work. She knew that she’d contributed, back there, to their six-to-nine-out-of-ten success. Still, though, it was nice to be acknowledged, and acknowledgement from _Starscream_ felt like a victory in itself. “Let’s make the next one a ten.”


End file.
